[1996-02-12-AJW] Manami Toyota & Mariko Yoshida & Kaoru Ito & Yumi Fukawa vs Takako Inoue & Kyoko Inoue & Chapparita Asari, Tomoko Watanabe & Kumiko Maekawa

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

A total spotfest, but one of the best ones I've ever seen, with everything hit clean and tons of 2.9 nearfalls. If that's your thing, you'll love this match, because it's a near-perfect match in that style. There's not much substance beyond that, aside from the basic mood of desperation the entire match. I enjoyed it. The best comparison seems like it would be the Michinoku Pro matches, but those had a better face/heel structure, so I don't think it would be a favorable comparison. Still, see this for tons of great highspots and offense.

[Tim Evans]

This felt like watching one of those ROH scramble matches from the early 2000s. Real fun match with some great performances from Asari and the chick that teamed with Toyota in the navy blue that took the Airplane spin at what looked like 50 MPH. However, I still have a hard time watching some of this joshi. The screaming bothers me and the shitty way they run the ropes and do double clotheslines.

[KB8]

This was worked and paced exactly like I thought it would be. I was kind of dreading watching it since something like that for 30 minutes isn't exactly my idea of a party, but I was stunned at how much I wound up liking it. I don't know half of the women in this, but the skinny girl on Toyota's team that Tim mentioned took quite the shitkicking. Toyota winds up wiping her out accidentally with a plancha and that leaves her with a busted nose, and then she takes that giant swing from Inoue where she spins around so quickly it looks like she's having to hold her own head in place for fear it'll pop off. Takako Inoue also ragdolls her with this Boston Crab sequence where she bends her like a slinky, flips her over, sits down HARD on her lower back, and bends her in two again. There's some super nasty looking shit in this. Couple DDTs that spike the receiver right on the top of their head and a few crazy reckless neck bumps. Then the skinny girl whose name I don't know gets kicked square in the beak a BUNCH of times. Takako standing on...some other woman whose name I don't know's head and flipping off the audience for booing her was my favourite part. I'm not sure what the story between those two were, but that was the final pairing and Takako looked awfully glad to be beating the shit out of her any time she was in there.

 

I couldn't watch this kind of thing very often without getting sick of it, but this was a real surprise and I'm glad I didn't skip it.

[Kevin Ridge]

Some good action with some minor sloppiness at times. I didn't even realize this was a handicap match until seeing the match listing after. Fine spot fest but the big tag team elimination Joshi match from 1990 was so much better than this.

[Zenjo]

This was like night and day with the rest of AJW's 1996 output pre August. Everyone was really motivated and the crowd were into it too. Wrestlers want new challenges and this match provided them. It was refreshing to see the top stars facing off against the youngsters in Fukawa, Asari and Maekawa. Underdog Yumi got a bloody nose, but it's her first memorable match so had to be worth it. Chapparita was really good here, delivering the ever exciting Skytwister. Such an awesome move because she never did it the same way twice and could land any way imaginable. '96 would end up being the best year of her career as Yoshida put her over big time in a couple of later matches.

 

Normally I'm not a big fan of the Captains Fall format as it's like a poor mans elimination match. It worked well here though with unpredictability the name of the game. The fresh matchups, the 5vs4 teams, Captain Kyoko taking lots of damage and being in danger. I never knew who was going to be eliminated next or who was going to win it. There was 28m of non-stop action with a consistently high quality level. The time flew by. Some great near falls that were spaced out well. It wasn't a case of early eliminations coming easy and then late eliminations being hard as is often the case. Takako vs Yoshida was the highlight.

 

An excellent one-off idea.

[PeteF3]

Yeah, count me as another who would normally have groaned at watching a 30-minute joshi spotfest, and another who enjoyed what he saw. I didn't love it--there's not a lot of story and I had trouble keeping track of who was whom--but this was a very fun AJW-meets-Michinoku-Pro sprint. Every new Yearbook carries a breakout star with it, and this time it's Tomoko Watanabe--possibly the smoothest, most agile fattie in the history of wrestling. All of her offense and bumping looked spectacular, and I was downright sad to see her go. Takako is also her usual colossally bitchy self--did Takako ever wrestle Mayumi Ozaki one-on-one? That might cause the universe to collapse. Fun stuff that I could have even kept watching if it'd gone longer.

[soup23]

All action fun stuff. There is a lot of names here, some that will be stars later on and some that are on their way down. The action was relentless and everything was hit really cleanly. It isn't something that is memorable spot by spot or a match that has a lot of depth but it was one of the better iterations of this type of match style and I was vastly enjoying myself watching the match. ***3/4

[tim]

I really liked the first fall. It definitely had that Joshi MPro feel, some cool spots and a great pace, that boston crab Ozaki was doing was awesome, and a nice dive segment. After that it was still entertaining enough, but it did wear on me toward the end. A bit too much of the same thing. The last few minutes though did have a good intensity. A lot of these girls I don't recognize, but I liked those handspring mule kicks by whoever did them.